It seems to me that the only
way that this amorphous movement that is now unfolding in Iran can have a
snowball chance in hell to succeed is to become a systematic and comprehensive
non-violent collective act of civil disobedience. To become a more determined
and directed social action, this movement will have to assume multiple
dimensions beyond a succession of demonstrations in the streets, which must
accompany a simultaneous act of discrediting the counter-demonstrations that the
regime organizes.
The Majlis might emerge as
one crucial site of contestation—though it is too early to tell. Today in the
Majlis, the courageous Qazvin Deputy, Qodratollah Alikhani denounced the way the
presidential election has been conducted. This was by no means the sentiment of
the Majlis in general, for as Alikhani spoke, Ahmadinejad's supporters were
interrupting him, and some 220 of them had in fact written a public letter and
congratulated him on his victory. But nevertheless some 52 deputies have
summoned the Interior Minister Mr. Mahsouli to come to the Majlis and explain
what happened yesterday during the demonstration and why demonstrators were shot
at, injured, and even killed. These 52 deputies have also been joined by
Speaker of the House Mr. Larijani, who today condemned the attacks on the
student dormitories as well as another
attack on Sobhan apartment complex at
2:30 AM on 14th June—presumably because defiant chants of Allahu
Akbar was coming from there. This may all be parliamentary maneuvering to no
particular public avail, but something more might be brewing there. It remains
to be seen.
Perhaps more important than
the Majlis in the snowballing of civil unrest is the demonstration of a group of
doctors and nurses at Rasul Akram Hospital in Tehran. I saw an eyewitness video
made by a mobile phone and dispatched globally. What we see here is the medical
staff of this hospital, while wearing their uniform, coming out of the hospital,
forming an impromptu rally, chanting Allahu Akbar and then talking to people in
the street about the casualties they had treated last night.
Doctors and nurses are protesting at
Rasul Akram
hospital in Tehran on June 16.
One of nurses is shouting "8
people died in this hospital last night". A board (in Persian) says
"8 dead, 28 wounded"
One of them, a
woman physician or nurse, came forward with a sign in her hand on which had been
written in Persian (obviously not for foreign correspondents but for immediate
public benefit) that the Emergency ward of Rasul Akram Hospital had treated 28
people with gunshot wounds, of which 8 have been martyred—and then concluded by
asking "Tonight and tomorrow night??" Meaning how many will be murdered?
Ordinary people soon gathered around and began applauding the medical staff.
Then a male nurse or physician came forward and said to the public that this is
only the statistics in this particular hospital, meaning there must be more in
others. My point here is not to play the number game about casualties. But to
point to the planned or spontaneous act of the staff of this hospital to walk
out and engage with the public.
Iranian national soccer team players
wearing green wristband during Iran-South Korea game on Wednesday.
If such quiet and dignified
civil unrest were to continue to unfold, things might assume different
proportions. The BBC reported today that the chancellor of Shiraz University had
resigned, and that the president of Tehran university has also expressed his
concerns publicly. Meanwhile the prominent Iranian vocalist Mohammad Reza
Shajarian had issued a statement and asked the national television NOT to
broadcast his patriotic songs. They were composed and sung in entirely
different circumstances, he said in his open letter, inappropriate for what is
now happening in Iran. This is in obvious defiance of a national television
that is universally perceived as the main propaganda machinery of the regime and
its choice president. Shajarian is an exceedingly popular and deeply loved
public figure, and his admonition of the national television carries weight. In
the same vein, I saw pictures of famous Iranian footballers sporting the color
of green as their wrist band and also included in the jersey they were wearing.
These are the signs we should
be looking for in days and weeks ahead. The Open expression of solidarity with
the movement in multiple public domains will put it outside official control.
They are rounding up the usual suspects of the reformist movement. But the
movement must now become more universal. The arrest and at times immediate
release of prominent reformists like Abtahi, now an advisor to Karrubi, and Said
Hajjarian, a prominent theorist and tactician of the reformist movement and the
target of an assassination attempt in March 2000, testifies to a certain degree
of panic on part of the regime, or else the commencement of a systematic
crackdown. In either case, it is the initially amorphous disposition of the
movement beyond the reformist figures that will have a wider effect.
Counter-demonstrations on
behalf of Ahmadinejad are of course well on the agenda. Today Sepah-e Mohammad
Rasul Allah/The Army of Muhammad the Messenger of God called for a
pro-Ahmadinejad rally at 4 PM Tehran time at Vali Asr Square in order to respond
to yesterday's anti-Ahmadinejad demonstration. Anti-Ahmadinejad demonstrators
also had a rally that moved towards the Jam-e Jam where the Iranian national
television headquarters is located. Mousavi issued a statement to this rally,
asked them to be vigilant, law-abiding, and peaceful, held the officials
responsible for their wellbeing, and reiterated his request for a nationwide
peaceful demonstration. The green color and Allahu Akbar remain the sign and the
principal slogan of the movement.
The international pressure of
course remains quite crucial. I called Paris to talk to Mohsen Makhmalbaf, who
is now actively campaigning on behalf of Musavi's cause, but learned from his
wife Marziyeh Meshkini that he has gone to Brussels (along with Marjane Satrapi)
to speak to the European Parliament asking them not to recognize Ahmadinejad's
election. Later I also watched a video of Makhmalbaf giving a speech at a
rally in Paris urging Iranians abroad to contact the governments of their
respective countries and urge them not to recognize the validity of this
election.
Ahmadinejad is currently in Russia attending a meeting as the Iranian
president. I also saw a circulated email asking for demonstration in front of
Russian embassies condemning their reception of Ahmadinejad as president.
According to Financial Times, Russia and China have recognized the
validity of the election, while France has expressed strong reservation, and the
US is threading a very thin line. Afghanistan, Turkey, Syria, and Venezuela,
according to official outlets in Iran have congratulated Ahmadinejad. Here is
the crucial task of Iranians in places like Australia, India, Japan, the US,
European capitals, Canada, and above all Arab and Muslim countries to pressure
their governments if possible, or alert the public opinion at the very least,
that this election was rigged from the get go, from its very commencement, from
the moment that the Guardian Council gets to decide who can run and who cannot.
The rest is now an academic exercise in futility. I have a forthcoming opinion
piece that CNN.com asked me to write in which I talk in detail about what is now
a "social fact" in Iran, that the election was rigged.
As the movement
thus unfolds so does our positions in reading it becomes more clear. Richard
Seymour has rightly taken issue with me regarding my statement about Mousavi
having the makeup of a Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King. I am happy he did,
for it gives me an opportunity to explain what I mean. I believe, as I have now
said on many occasions, that the only chance that this movement has is as a
non-violent collective act of civil disobedience. I am well aware of the dead
skeletons in Mousavi's past (do please cast a cursory glance at what I teach and
what I have written for now almost half a century—yes I wrote my first letter of
protest to the governor of Khuzestan when I was eight; though yes, my mother
dictated it to me: ) and have referred to them in the CNN piece I just
mentioned, as I in fact also mentioned it briefly yesterday on GRITTV with Laura
Flanders and David Barsamian. In my CNN piece I also mentioned that the last
major student uprising was in fact during the presidency of Khatami in 1999, two
years afar his landslide victory. Though I voted for Mousavi as the best
possible candidate available to us and in solidarity with the nascent movement
inside Iran, holding my nose the same way I held it when I voted for Obama, I am
no reformer, nor do I shoot from the hip, as it were, when it comes to my
careful reading of what is unfolding in front of us. When I see hundreds of
thousands of innocent people peacefully marching in the streets against the
firearm of a brutal and bruised Islamic Republic, I fear the worse. In my
opinion, it is too early to tell how the interplay between Musavi, et. al. and
the volcano they have unleashed will work out. Again as I said in my CNN piece
today, Mousavi is not all that this movement wants, nor is Mousavi totally in
control of the movement. There is a dialectic between the two, facing the
thuggish brutalities of the regime as they go along. To me the only way that
this movement can come to a meaningful fruition (not just in securing a recount
or even a re-election but in fact addressing the wider range of civil liberties)
is if it aspires to a non-violent collective act of civil disobedience that from
Gandhi to MLK has always needed a visionary leadership. I am not sure if
Mousavi or Khatami are those figures. But I do believe that Mousavi in
particular has the public demeanor and disposition of becoming one, the "make
up" of such a leadership—as has in fact Akbar Ganji if he were in Iran now.
Someone of that caliber might be able to rise to the occasion. So for the
record, my solidarity is with nothing and nobody other than the those exemplary
and courageous young and old men and women in the streets, with the movement
itself, as it unfolds—and in what ever way it opts to define itself and its
immediate and distant goals.
Beyond this
clarification, there is one other crucial issue that I must emphasize here. A
key and critical question at this point is the emergence of a new language of
revolt that will correspond to the realities of this movement and not reduced to
cliché-ridden, tired, and old assumptions. Any act of theorization of this
movement, what exactly is it, and to what extend it will go, must be exceedingly
cautious, gradual, and in correspondence with the manner in which it is
unfolded. But of one thing we can be sure. We cannot allow this movement to be
assimilated backward into the existing delusional discourses—weather from the
so-called opposition forces outside or the dominant discourses inside Iran.
Here I will give two examples. The first example is from the "oppositional"
forces outside Iran. Yesterday I saw yet another inane email from Reza Pahlavi
expressing his royal solidarity with the demonstrators. Obviously His Royal
Idiocy, and the sycophant band of good-for-nothings that have gathered around
him seem to be clinically delusional and under the impression that anyone on
this side of sanity cares what he and his criminal dynasty think of anything.
As an Iranian citizen, Reza Pahlavi is of course entitled to his opinion about
anything. But in matters of politics only after he drops any and all ludicrous
claims to that bloody throne that he and his criminal father and even more
thuggish grandfather left behind when they brutalized and swindled that nation
and fled Iran.
The same is true
about the dominant Islamist discourse inside Iran, even when, or perhaps
particularly when, it is formulated by the progressive clerics. Yesterday I
heard Mohsen Kadivar interviewed on BBC Persian. In conversation with an
anchorperson, Kadivar gave an extended explication about how the evident
irregularities of this election constitute a breach of the public confidence and
is thus a violation of justice and as a result it is incumbent upon juridical
authorities to opine on the matter. Now, I know, have met, read, and have a
deep affection and even admiration for Mohsen Kadivar for the numerous occasions
he has spoken truth to that brutal power called the Islamic Republic. But there
is a crucial issue of which he seems to be entirely oblivious and the time to
clear and settle it is right now. This movement cannot be branded in any
received terms within Iranian political culture, and for one thing it cannot be,
yet again, categorically Islamized, juridicalized, Fiqhified. Let me explain.
Even in the chimerical
concoction called an "Islamic Republic," we are the citizens of a republic and
NOT mere subjects of a medieval jurisprudence, for it makes no difference if we
are the physical subjects of a tyrant monarch or the metaphoric subjects of a
medieval jurisprudence—in both we are denied historical agency and the site of
our public reason. Unless and until Mohsen Kadivar, as a genuinely
progressive jurist, understands this simple fact we will never ever get
anywhere. I for one, again, to repeat, as a citizen of a republic, could not
care less what he or any other progressive jurist thinks of my rights as a
citizen. That juridical opinion is irrelevant to me, with all due respect. As
a Muslim I deny him, and with him the best and the worst of them all together,
the authority to transform my agential autonomy as a citizen of a republic into
a juridical trope in his (however progressive or retrograde) jurisprudence. To
me, when it comes to this militant or soft, aggressive or gentle, brutal or
banal over-juridicalization of Iranian political culture, there is no difference
between Mohsen Kadivar and Mesbah Yazdi. They both speak the same juridical
language, though from two conservative and liberal ends of it. As a citizen, I
no longer wish to be at the mercy of either the criminal backwardness of Mesbah
Yazdi or the open-minded liberalism of Mohsen Kadivar. What part of that simple
point is incomprehensible? We are in the depth of this misery called the
"Islamic Republic" that we are precisely because these people, the best of them,
namely Mohsen Kadivar, have made a name and a reputation for themselves and
formulated their positions in absence of any contrapuntal position by people who
do not think like they do. They have degenerated an entire republic, and with
it a public domain, and with it a public reason, into the topography of a
variegated jurisprudence from which there is no exit.
Kadivar tells the skeptical
anchorperson of BBC Persian that Ulama are infinitely more important in Iran
than intellectuals, artists, or even athletes. Now, personally I believe he is
entirely self-delusional at this point in history to think that way. But the
point of the argument is not between his thinking that he and his ilk are more
important to Iranian society by virtue of being a Shi'i jurist than say Bahram
Beiza'i or Mahmoud Dolatabadi. The point is that within my sense of the
republic in which we must ultimately hope to live there is plenty of room for
any jurist of any stripe as a citizen. But in the medieval jurisprudence of a
Shi'i jurist, however progressive and open-minded he might be, there is
absolutely not a niche for me as a citizen—for that jurisprudence I am always
already transmuted into a juridical subject, a jurisprudential trope, a mere
dialogical trope in his syllogism.
Mohsen Kadivar looks at me
and does not see a citizen; he sees a mere subject of his law. In other words,
the notion of the public reason as the cornerstone of citizenry has not
ever crossed the mind of these jurists. I am a Muslim, Mr. Kadivar, as you well
know, a Shi'i Muslim. I have nothing but love and admiration and utter respect
for my parental religion. Since 9/11 I walk and proudly proclaim myself a
Muslim in a country and context now Islamophobic to the marrow of its bone. But
not all Iranians are Muslims, or Shi'i, or believing or practicing. There are
Baha'i Iranians, as there are Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, and plain old
atheists and agonistic Iranians—and God bless them al! But the notion of a
republic, Mr. Kadivar, could not care less to what god we may opt to pray or at
other times scream out loud upon the dead corpse of a young body just murdered
by agents of the "Islamic Republic" and cry our curses. Unless and until you,
Mr. Kadivar, the best that our medieval jurisprudence has produced, come to
grips with this very simple fact, even this massive movement that is unfolding
in front of our eyes will yet again be creatively, kindly, and quite generously
Islamized, once again.
We have all been silenced,
forced into exile, and by virtue of the absence of freedom of expression in the
Islamic Republic never had a chance openly, politely, and respectfully disagree
with this violent or gentle over-juridicalization of our political culture. So
Mr. Kadivar, there are perfectly sane (Aqil) and mature (Baliq)
Iranians who, with all due respect, could not give a hoot what the most
progressive, open-minded, generous-hearted, Shi'i jurists think of the current
crisis we face. Over this public space, in which we live as citizens,
your jurisprudence has no jurisdiction. You are, of course, as an Iranian (just
like Reza Pahlavi) entitled to whatever position you may have on the matter.
But please check your medieval jurisprudence at the door and speak in plain
language of our common citizenry, with the public reason with which we
need to build our future republic. Thank you!
About the author: Hamid Dabashi is the author
of Iran: A People Interrupted. His daily dairy and other commentary on
the current crisis in Iran can be read at: www.hamiddabashi.com
